Russian Mercenaries African Drug Empire, Israel’s Sushi Mob war & the murdered Assassin: Stash House
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Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights. You'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention. And then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
Hello and welcome to the Underworld Podcast, a show hosted by two journalists who have reported on this sort of stuff all over the world and now bring you a weekly show on international organized crime from here, from there, from the past, from the present, from the future, whatever you guys want to know. I am Danny Gold. I am joined as always by handsome Englishman, Sean Williams, and Buenos Aires. And uh yeah, this week you guys may have noticed there's no cold. open. This is like our our show we call Stash House that we do approximately every six to eight weeks when we've got a run out of ideas or don't want to sit down and write a full episode. It's a special occasion where we want th run through the craziest international organized crime stories out there right now.
Sean, what do you have to say for yourself?
I'm just sorry, generally, about everything that I've done and do and will do. Um, so apologies to everyone for that. But uh yeah, shall we um should we jump into organised crime? There's people have done worse things than me. Yeah.
Some real quick, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast for bonus episodes, underworldpod.com for merch and all that. You can email us at theunderworldpodcast at gmail.com. You can also sign up on Spotify or on iTunes. Okay, first up, a place that is near and dear to my heart, the Central African Republic. I think I made my first big documentary there when the Civil War broke out in December of 2013, and uh still one of the craziest places in situ. situations I've ever been in. And I was with the legendary war photographer Robert King. If you haven't seen the movie about his life, uh I think you can get it on iTunes, watch it, and then imagine sharing a hotel room with him for two weeks during the outbreak of a civil war in one of the poorest countries on earth.
Oh,
heaven. In hell. Actually, I went back and watched a few of those videos from your trip and uh kudos, man. That's great work. Just uh I was just thinking how uniquely mad that part of the world is with just I'd just love to do something again there soon, but Um, for now, after Cuba, I'm I'm gonna spend like six to nine months just uh looking up stories about kite flyers and guys who make model railways in their homes, so No more of that for me.
Well, maybe you could do this story, but you probably would get killed doing it. Here's the Wall Street Journal with one of those headlines that like went straight into my veins and the stash house folder. Quote Wagner's remnants are running an opioid empire in the center of Africa. I mean Buddy. Like this is this is for me. Bullseye. Yeah. Bullseye, right? Quick Wagner speedrun. If you guys don't remember all the craziness with them the last few years or didn't listen to our full episode on them, which must have been a few years ago by now, right? A few. Yeah. They are a diabolical Russian mercenary outfit that basically functions as an apparatus of the Russian state, except it gives them plausible deniability, which is good because they do things like killing people with slaves.
Sledgehammers and filming it, amongst others. They're active in Ukraine, the Middle East, Africa. They do the whole like massacre, rape, pillage, exploit natural resources sort of thing, and they're pretty, pretty good at those things. Yevgeny Prigozin is the founder and leader. He's a Russian ex con who did about nine years for robbery, got out in 1990, sold hot dogs, which you know, I support selling hot dogs by not. not everything else that he does. He worked his way up to running the restaurant where Putin entertained visiting heads of state, became Putin's chef, ran a troll farm, then owned the most famous private army on earth.
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Chapters
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3 identifiedMore from The Underworld Podcast
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